“That coarseness and strength combine with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom, –these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American intellect will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment at the frontier the bonds of custom are broken, and unrestraint in triumphant: There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraint and its ideas, and indifference to its lesson, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American History.”
Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893

I must be a Democrat. Surely I must be. If I dream of one day reading a book while lounging back in my seat as I travel from one United States city to the next in a high speed train, then I must be a Democrat. Or would I simply be a human hoping for the sanity of when I don’t hop in my car, which costs me hundreds of dollars to maintain and insure every year, weave my way into a four-lane highway of traffic and nervously shark my way into an hour-long search for a parking spot? Please help me to understand were I fit in the political spectrum of ideas. I need to pick a side. November is just next month.
I’m being told of certain hopeful politicians blowing rhetorical smoke of “subsidizing” rail infrastructure, and how we can’t afford such a scheme, in hopes of striking a nerve in fear of “big government” and higher taxes. Don’t we, the tax payer, pay for the roads that grow wider with every American Recovery and Reinvestment dollar spent? Don’t we pay for the ring roads that circulate traffic around cities causing suburb ring, after suburb ring, after suburb ring…?
Ohio is being offered 8 billion dollars to connect the three C’s, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, cities rotting from the core due to suburb growth. The politicians are divided down party lines as to whether or not the state should accept federal dollars for such an endeavor.
The third largest recipient of American Recovery and Reinvestment dollars in Ohio is American Electric Power (AEP), the single largest land owner in the state. They will receive over 300 million dollars to install pollution controls in their smokestacks (scrubbers). This is the equivalent of me getting a government grant to put a new exhaust pipe on my 1980 diesel Volkswagen. Ahh… ha! I’ll look into it.